Is good customer service that hard for businesses?

I don't believe bad service is intentional, just thoughtless.

After 3 recent experiences, it's no wonder people complain about customer service, or the lack of it, when a few simple actions will make a difference to build a positive relationship with customers.

Experience 1 - my wife Debbie was having trouble with her guitar. She took it to the store where she bought it; the tech determined the electric pickup was defective and ordered the replacement part.
After one week, she called the store, and the part wasn't in yet.
After two weeks, she called again. The tech was out, and no one knew the status of the repair.
After three weeks she called again. The guitar was repaired and ready for pickup.

No one called to say it was ready. It could have been only ready earlier that day, or it could have been the day of her last call. No matter, the store employees nor the tech cared enough to call and keep her updated.

Experience 2 - Deb ordered bumper stickers from a local printer.
After one week - she called, they weren't ready yet.
After two weeks - she called, the stickers were on schedule to print soon.
After three weeks - she called, and the stickers were done and waiting for her to pick them up.

Again, the stickers could have been done that days or several days earlier. She didn't know, but the printer didn't call to tell her they were finished. She asked him when they were done, and his reply "several days. He was waiting for her to call."

Experience 3 - I was placing an on-line order for business cards. After creating the text using a stock photo, I approved the on-line art but when I went to check out, I received the message "Cart empty."

I tried several ways to place the order without losing my work, but none allowed my order to show up in the cart.

Fortunately, they have a live customer service dept. I called and explained my problem. The tech asked a few questions about my browser, then mentioned that the recent IE7 update wasn't working with their shopping cart software. I would need to use another browser and start over.

I was not happy.

When I asked why they didn't post that info on their home page to save customers time, all she said was their programmers were working on it.

I wasted an hour trying to solve a problem that they know about but wouldn't share with customers a simple solution with their customers.

In all three experiences, the business chose not to communicate with clients. The result - a frustrated client.

Not good.

Why knowingly make it hard for customers?

Do they think their products or services are so unique that no one else offers them? No, not at all.

I don't think it's intentional, just thoughtless. Employees are doing their jobs, completing a task then going on to the next one without any thought to their customer's needs.

The solution is rather simple:

Think from the customers point of view about how to make it easy to work with your business.
Keep the customer informed.
Call the customer when the order is ready or if it's being shipped to the customer, call to say when it's scheduled for delivery.
If there's a problem, then tell the customer and offer a solution or options for the customer to choose.
When there's a problem, the typical reaction is to not say anything like my on-line experience.
If the customer doesn't know there's a problem, no need telling him/her about it; however, if the problem persists and the customer's order is delayed that only makes for an upset customer.

Frequently employees are hired to do a specific job or task(s) and dealing with people is not part of the job. Customer service is everyone's job including the owner, and it's important to train people how to commmunicate with customers.

That's why I believe that poor customer service is not intentional, just thoughtless. Put some thought into the experience.

Keeping the customer informed will go far in maintaining and building good customer relationships.